Posts from the “Uncategorized” Category

All of us recall the tumult of the coronavirus last winter. After much prayer, church leadership has decided in a preemptive move to cancel all public worship and other ordinary meetings for January – April 2021. This is flu season (which could very well include another Coronavirus-like contagion), and we’d rather not take the risk of an outbreak in our congregation due to public worship. Loving your neighbor means not risking exposing him or her to coronavirus, and all of us agree this is more important than meeting in a church building. We will reevaluate this decision for flu season 2022.

Depending on how this new policy goes, we’re also considering canceling public worship during the summer months when so many of our families are away on vacation.

We were encouraged last winter by how many of our congregants preferred this more convenient way to worship on Sunday, especially families with small children, and we believe we can attract many more “virtual” members to our church with this new policy.

This would mean that, moving forward, we would meet for worship in May and in September – December. This will make traditional in-person Sunday worship very special when we do have it.

Like last winter, we’ll live-stream Sunday worship, and musicians will separately stream our sacred music for the day. Please transmit your tithe and offerings online.

During this time, we encourage small groups, but no more than three people, please.

Please contact the church office about baptism, which will resume in May. Feel free to celebrate your own Lord’s Supper in your home.

Let’s always remember that we can worship just as well alone as we can in a group, and that the church isn’t a building or a meeting, but God’s people wherever they are.

25 of My Favorite Christian Books You’ve (Probably) Never Read

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on March 18, 2020

I already supplied a list of my favorite modern novels for your Coronavirus-quarantined enjoyment, so now I’ll elevate the genre by providing a list of 25 of my favorite Christian books that (in my view) are either excessively obscure or simply less popular than they should be.

1. Christianity and Classical Culture, by Charles Norris Cochrane

2. The Unseen Realm, by Michael Heiser

3. Christ and the Caesars, by Ethelbert Stauffer

4. Foundations of Social Order, by R. J. Rushdoony

5. Act & Being, by Colin Gunton

6. Israel and the New Covenant, by Roderick Campbell

7. Fountainhead of Federalism, Heinrich Bullinger

8. The Vindication of Tradition, by Jaroslav Pelikan

9. The Christian Future, by Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

10. The Cruciality of the Cross, by P. T. Forsyth

11. The Christian Family, by Herman Bavinck

12. The Formation of Christendom, by Christopher Dawson

13. Gospel and Law, by Daniel P. Fuller

14. The Problem of Historicity, by Gerhard Ebeling

15. The Impulse of Power, by Michael W. Kelley

16. The Sufficiency of Scripture, by Noel Weeks

17. Called to be Holy, by John Oswalt

18. Against the Protestant Gnostics, by Philip J. Lee

19. Born for Battle, by R. Arthur Mathews

20. The Soul of Prayer, by P. T. Forsyth

21. The Trinity, by Karl Rahner

22. Theology of My Life, by John M. Frame

23. Foolishness to the Greeks, by Lesslie Newbigin

24. The Lost History of Christianity, by Philip Jenkins

25. The Good of Affluence, by John Schneider

My Top Ten Modern Novels

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on March 17, 2020

I’m hearing folks will spending lots of time indoors the next few days (weeks?), so I thought I’d compile a couple of genre reading lists. Here’s the first:

1. The Straw Men, Michael Marshall

2. The Snowman, Joe Nesbø

3. The Charm School, Nelson DeMille

4. The Secret History, Donna Tartt

5. The Leopard, Joe Nesbø

6. Spy Line, Len Deighton

7. Broken Shore, Peter Temple

8. Hannibal, Thomas Harris

9. The Black Ice, Michael Connelly

10. Running Blind, Lee Child

Parental Responsibility and Covenant Conditionality

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on March 3, 2020

Christian parents guilt-ridden (wrongly) over wayward adult children, believing (wrongly) that proper rearing is the exclusive condition of children’s faith might be comforted by the knowledge that the first Father’s children ruined the human race, despite living in a sinless environment, and that the same Father grieved in his heart:

“Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth!

For the Lord has spoken:

“I have nourished and brought up children,

And they have rebelled against Me” (Isa. 1:2)

Critical Theory: The Basics

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on February 18, 2020

***The Frankfurt School, intellectually and sinfully brilliant cadre that changed Western culture***

Critical theory (CT) is getting press today among conservatives chiefly because of its inroads in the Southern Baptist Convention and similar groups. This belated recognition is unfortunate, because had conservatives been culturally attune they would not now be fighting with their backs to the church walls. But because so many have been influenced by ecclesiastical colonization, and take notice of cultural evils only when they threaten the church, they are ill-prepared to confront the depraved intruders. A comprehensive Reformational paradigm for cultural engagement would have largely bypassed this problem, but too many conservatives are culturally passive to engage this paradigm. Better late than never, however.

CT is not hard to understand, but it is hard to begin to understand. It’s like driving a stick shift: once you get the hang of it, you don’t even think of it as you’re driving. It’s getting the hang of it that’s the bother. This post will help you get the hang of CT.

CT is the way of thinking that Cultural Marxists devised to sabotage and replace Western culture.[1] It began with Marxist intellectuals in Frankfurt, Germany between World Wars I and II, in the 20s and 30s. It’s a dangerous, apostate way of thinking. It has largely created the culture we live in. It’s taken for granted by many professors at many universities? What is CT?

Thinking about thinking

First, it’s not just a way of thinking. It’s a way of thinking about thinking. The critical theorists wanted to change not just what we think, but how we think. How do we normally think? I don’t mean just quick thoughts as we navigate our day. I mean when we ruminate: when we ponder, when we think deeply.

If we spend time “thinking through” some topic, we analyze it. We might ask ourselves, “Why did I just lose my best friend?” We might come up with several answers: “I said something offensive.” Or: “He or she was selfish.” Or: “We outgrew one another.” But the critical theorists would say that while these verdicts might be true, they’re superficial. To get a real handle, we must understand the larger context of that loss of friendship. And that context is always social. It’s not just you and your friend. It’s you and your friend and the social forces you live within, the world you were born into, the forces that made and make that world — and you.

You’ve been shaped by the structures of society: your past, your parents, your material possessions (or lack of them), your job, your race, your other relationships, and the wider society itself. It’s only when you take all of these into account that you really understand why things happen as they do. For this reason, the critical theorists say, you can’t just look at the breakup of the friendship and analyze it. The underlying reasons are never self-evident. You must also look at all the social forces at work, and then you can come to understand the real, deep, underlying reason(s) it happened. Point #1 — we must analyze the social forces behind every act and event.

Dialectical reality

Now we get to the second main feature of CT: dialectics.[2] This means that reality is always in motion, and to understand it, we must understand where it came from, and where it’s going. Reality is always in flux. It’s like watching a movie in a theater and, therefore, without a remote or digital button like you have at home with streaming video: we can’t pause or rewind reality. This means we can’t analyze reality like we could a snapshot photo. The friendship breakup in our metaphor has been coming on for a while. It will also lead to something else for the two former friends. We can’t analyze the breakup apart from what brought it on and what it is leading to. Point #2 — we must see the act or event from its past, present, and future perspectives to really know it.

Progress by conflict

Third: reality is in motion, but the changes to reality come by conflict. In other words, conflict is a part of nature. It’s a law of the universe. Karl Marx, intellectual fountainhead of CT, was influenced by the German idealist Hegel. You might have heard of his idea of thesis-antithesis-synthesis. We start with a thesis, an idea, of the way things are. Let’s extend our metaphor: Belle and Marsha are friends. But then comes a conflicting factor (the antithesis): Jerry is a handsome single guy who likes Belle and takes Belle away from Marsha, destroying the girls’ friendship. Then comes the synthesis: Jerry and Belle get engaged, but Belle asks Marsha to be her maid of honor at her wedding. This then becomes the new thesis: at least three new (kinds of) relationships — Belle and Jerry; Belle and Marsha; and Belle, Marsha and Jerry — come about. Then there will be a new antithesis to conflict with this thesis, and that conflict will create a new synthesis, and so on. This is a simple case of dialectics. But the good news is that this change is always progress. This means that you can never have progress without conflict. So conflict is good.

The Bible, in radical contrast, teaches that Jesus Christ and God’s word and his law are unchanging (Heb. 13:8; 1 Pet. 1:25; Mt. 5:18). Conflict isn’t an inherent part of the universe; there’s only conflict because of sin. But critical theorists thought these categories were static and boring. They were excited by the idea that man and the world aren’t bound by eternal truths. We are always in process toward something else and something better (recall that Darwinism and its view of evolution began in the 19^th century). This also meant that morals and ethics aren’t fixed. They’re in flux. This was the cornerstone of Marx’s guiding philosophy: dialectical materialism.

The point of CT is that all of life is dialectical — everything and everyone is in the process of becoming different, even their opposite. So we cannot analyze what something is, as if it were final, only what it was, and what it is, and what it is becoming. Point #3 — Reality is evolving, always in motion, and conflict is creating the change.

Morality is always a power play in flux

Next point: This is just as true of moral standards. They too are in motion. Listen to how Marx and his famed associate Frederick Engels described this in the Communist Manifesto:

[D]on’t wrangle with us so long as you apply, to our intended abolition of bourgeois property, the standard of your bourgeois [middle class, the traditionalists, the property owners] notions of freedom, culture, law, &c. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence [law, courts] is but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will whose essential character and direction are determined by the economical conditions of existence of your class.[3]

Marx is speaking to his intellectual enemies. They were identifying his views with theft, for example: They say, “Marx, you’re program means stealing from the haves to give to the have-nots.” Marx replies that there are no universal standards of morality, so what one claims is theft another may claim as justice. Moral standards are dialectical. They are in flux. Marx believed that economic ideas (all ideas, in fact) arise from people’s material condition, for instance, whether they were rich, poor, or somewhere in between. If they were rich or bourgeois, they would believe that it’s stealing for the state to take all property so they can distribute it fairly to everybody (Robin Hood economics, we might call it). In other words, there is no eternal, fixed definition of stealing. Your economic condition leads you to invent your definition of stealing. Marx was a relativist: morality isn’t fixed, but dependent on your condition or place in history or culture.

There aren’t any absolute moral standards. Adultery and homosexuality are called sins by the Bible, but only because the people who wrote the Bible lived in a society that had a mistaken view of the family. But through conflict with opposing views, we know better today. Then again, we’ll know even better 100 years from now.

In the case of our breakup, for instance, Jerry brought Belle into an oppressive relationship (marriage), but Belle can later use Marsha to help her get a boyfriend with whom she can have sex to get her out of her marriage with Jerry. And this wouldn’t be wrong, because it would squash marriage as an oppressive relationship. Point #4 — Moral standards are dialectical. Through conflict, they change.

The historically inevitable march to human liberation

Fifth: historical and social forces are moving toward throwing off all human oppression. All inequality is oppression. And all human relationships are now based on power and exploitation — men over women, whites and Asians over blacks and Hispanics, heterosexuals over homosexuals, parents over children, employers over employees. It’s all about power. But CT doesn’t spend a lot of time blaming the oppressors: they’re just a product of their class and of historical processes.

The goal of CT is to help accelerate the time when there will be less inequality. Belle and Marsha and Jerry won’t have conflicts because they’ll like each other equally. Jerry won’t take Belle away from Marsha because there won’t be any marriage. Even if there is, it won’t imply they belong exclusively to one another. There will be no reason they cannot all be friends equally, on level ground. Point #5 — the movement of history is toward equality, meaning the end of all oppression. This will be a secular utopia. Presumably, this will be the end of all progress and conflict.

Human imagination can change everything

Sixth, a great impediment to the secular utopia is the prominent belief that we cannot change culture. CT holds that two main ways of seeing culture are by objectification and reflection. Objectification is the problem. We are born into a world that has convinced itself that there are some universal laws or standards or realities that take certain types of social change off the table. For instance, we believe that acquisitiveness — the desire to get or acquire more things for comfort or style — is rooted in what it means to be human. We believe humans are just naturally acquisitive, so we need to arrange a social system like free markets to cater to them.

But this is just objectification. It’s not natural, but just an idea that we believe to be natural, and since this is so, we can work toward a system like socialism that works to change man to make him not acquisitive, that is, that makes it natural not to want private property but to share everything. And if people seem naturally acquisitive, then we can change them. This is why both Marxism and CT work to reengineer human nature. Human nature is not fixed or unchangeable. The very idea of what it means to be human we can change. You can smash the acquisitive quality out of people. In our extended metaphor, since Belle and Marsha believe that adultery is not wrong but only a morality invented by status-monopolizing traditionalists, they have no compunctions about pressing toward the perfect relationship by breaking up Belle’s oppressive marriage to Jerry.

But this requires a different way of thinking, and that thinking is reflective thinking. Reflective thinking is thinking that allows all possibilities to be on the table. CT doesn’t like the idea that we can know the truth just by inspecting nature, or the way things are now. We need to be imaginative. This is why dialectical materialism is given to human imagination. If we can conceive of a particular type of human, a particular type of world, then we can create it. And we should create it. Of course, this is formula for social disaster.

The biblical view is that man can accomplish a great deal in creation and culture, and he should, but he must do this within the boundaries of God’s creation within creational norms and biblical law. Man’s imagination is not the limit of what he can do. God’s world bounded by his law is the limit of man can do. Point # 6: people must give up objective ways of thinking and embrace reflective ways of thinking, not taking any possibilities off the table.

Change the world; don’t just analyze it

Seventh, the task of CT is actively to work toward that secular utopia. Critical theorists don’t just analyze. Their task is to change the world, not just describe it. Better yet, to describe it in such a way as to change it. Their very CT changes the world. And they themselves are changed in changing it. Marsha and Belle change themselves in changing their little world. Everything is moving toward a world of secular perfection: no oppression, all equal. Point #7 — CT changes society. They liberate the oppressed and create equality.

This, in summary and simplicity, is Critical Theory.

And there’s nothing remotely Christian about it.

[1] Max Horkheimer, “Traditional Theory and Critical Theory,” Critical Theory, Selected Essays (New York: Continuum, 2002), 188–252; Michael Walsh, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace, The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West (New York and London: Encounter Books, 2015).

[2] J. V. Stalin, “Dialectical and Historical Materialism.” See also Robert L. Heilbroner, Marxism, For and Against (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1980).

[3] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “The Manifesto of the Communist Party,” Marx, Mortimer J. Adler, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 427.

Gospel: Restoring Humanity, Not Rescuing from Creation

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on February 10, 2020

The goal of the gospel is not to rescue people out of the created world. It is to gradually purify the created world of sin and restore human furnishing — not just human furnishing, in fact, but furnishing for all of creation. The creation itself, Paul writes, is groaning for redemption (Rom. 8:22). When the curse is removed, creation itself will be restored to its full, incomparable splendor.

Man in full

This means that the gospel restores to man is full humanity. I don’t mean by this that when man fell into sin, he became less than a man, but he did become less and what God intended for humanity. He became shattered, denuded, and miserable.

But he didn’t lose his divine image indelibly inscribed on him. The fall was an act of apostasy, not just an act of rebellion. Man is created with an ineradicable desire to worship. If he doesn’t worship the Triune God, he will worship something else, like creation or himself. This is what produced ancient paganism. The pagans turned away from God, but they couldn’t turn away from their desires for what God intended them to enjoy. They abandoned God’s house and moved into the Devil’s house, but they had to take the furniture with them. They wanted to enjoy this world but enjoy it in a way that God never intended. God won’t permit that. This is why all sinners eventually become miserable. God doesn’t give them the satisfaction of flourishing in ways that he never designed.

Wealth and sex

Wealth, for example, is inherently good. The Bible states plainly that God gives us the power to get wealth (Dt. 8:18). Wealth shouldn’t be used only to plant churches and finance missionaries, though these are essential. It’s also legitimately used to enjoy the Good Life, good life as God intends, of course. Certainly wealth can be abused, and often is abused. When it’s transformed into an in itself, it leads to greed, covetousness, and destruction, including self-destruction. Humans cheat and lie and kill for wealth. Wealth alone doesn’t satisfy, and it was never meant to satisfy. Wealth obtained in God’s way satisfies. Wealth gained legitimately never satisfies. God won’t allow it.

The pagans turned away from God, but they couldn’t turn away from their desires for what God intended them to enjoy. They abandoned God’s house and moved into the Devil’s house, but they had to take the furniture with them.

The same is true of sex. Its function isn’t just pro-creational. It’s also for human delight, human furnishing.[1] God’s sexual plan limits it to marriage: one man for one woman for one lifetime. When we turn away from God, however, and see sex as an end in itself, and seek its delights outside his will, we never achieve permanent satisfaction. There’s immediate satisfaction, and permanent damage (1 Cor. 6:15–18). Why? Because God wants us to enjoy this world in his way, and not some other way. When we covet what’s beyond God’s gracious designs for us, he pays us in dissatisfaction. How does God do this? Note Calvin Seerveld’s riveting words:

[T]he Lord eats away stealthily at that which a person has and wants more of (like the fellow in Luke 12:18). If you covet your neighbour’s wealth, God punishes you with the insatiable discontent of the miser. If you covet sexual satisfaction with your neighbour’s spouse, God will spoil the joy one know[s] in erotic troths (cf. Proverbs 6:23–29). If you covet a career success and becoming well-known, God the moth will eat away the fabric of your respect for others and punish you with the reputation of riding roughshod over your fellow workers….[2]

Confidence in our God-rigged universe

We live in a God-rigged universe. God is the house, and we can never beat the house. The house always wins. God has arranged the universe so that all of those who introduce viruses to destroy the system end up destroying themselves. “Whoever digs a pit will fall into it, [a]nd he who rolls a stone will have it roll back on him” (Pr. 26:27). Divine wisdom declares, “But he who sins against me wrongs his own soul; [a]ll those who hate me love death” (Pr. 8:36). In fighting against God, man combats himself.

Why no anxiety

Incidentally, this is why we need never be concerned that the chaotically sinful world is spinning out of control. When we see rampant political conflict and international terrorism and anarchic sexuality and pervasive chemical addictions, we might get the impression that the world is doomed. But the world isn’t doomed. This is God’s world, and it’s a good world, and he will purge all the sin out of it. He rigged the universe so that only he would win. The apostates can wreak a lot of havoc, but in the end it’s they, not God’s good world, that are doomed.

When we appeal to unbelievers (and even wayward Christians), therefore, we don’t simply say, “You’d better give up your sins and trust Jesus or he’ll judge you.” That, of course, should be declared, and it’s true. But we should also say that if they persist in their path, they’ll only destroy themselves. Jesus said to the unconverted multitude,

Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.” (Mt. 11:28–30)

Jesus alone furnishes true rest and delight. To his disciples he offers these inspiring promises:

“The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.” (Jn. 10:10)
“These things I have spoken to you, that My joy may remain in you, and that your joy may be full.” (Jn. 15:11)

The appeal of the gospel to unbelievers is the appeal to return to what it means to be fully human. [3]

[1] P. Andrew Sandlin, The Christian Sexual Worldview (Coulterville, California: Center for Cultural Leadership, 2015).

[2] Calvin Seerveld, Take Hold of God and Pull (Carlisle, Cumberland, England: Paternoster, 1999), 49–50.

[3] Gordon J. Spykman, Reformational Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), 70.

The Free-Floating Irrelevance of Ecclesiastical Colonization

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on January 31, 2020

The church is indispensable in God’s kingdom. The church alone is his local, gathered community washed in the blood of his Son under the oversight of earthly shepherds.[1] (There is no such thing as the “invisible” church in the Bible.) The church alone preserves structured theological belief (orthodoxy). The church alone is the pillar and buttress of truth (1 Tim. 3:15). The church alone administers the sacraments, or ordinances. The church is God’s chief institution for maturing his people (Eph. 4:1–16).

But the church isn’t God’s central work in the earth, and it certainly isn’t his only work. His chief work is his kingdom (Mt. 6:33), his rule and reign, to which institutions like family, church, and state contribute. The church is a single divinely established institution among several, and to elevate it to a more domineering place leads to the blight of ecclesiastical colonization. [2]

Contracting Christianity

Because the church is obviously vital, many Christians get the idea that where God is at work in the world, he is working everything within the church. This ecclesiastical colonization has historically come in one of two forms: (1) the role of the church is expanded to dominate all of life: family, education, politics, and culture. All culture must be church-ruled culture. The Middle Ages sometimes perpetuated this error,[3] which we can designate as ecclesiocracy — the rule of the church. This isn’t a problem anywhere in the Western world today.

But there’s also (2): The role of Christianity is contracted to conform to the church. It’s this second problem that’s pervasive today. The only important Christian things are happening in the church; everything outside the church is secondary or irrelevant as far as the Faith is concerned. The idea that culture itself should be Christian is a huge mistake.[4] Because economics, politics, science, technology, entertainment and sports aren’t a part of the church, they need and should not be Christian. This error is apparent in the so-called “Two-Kingdom” Theology:[5] the kingdom of the church is governed by the Bible, but the kingdom outside the church is regulated by “natural” theology, on what both Christians and non-Christians can agree are common-sense, non-Christian principles: Jesus is an absentee landlord. This dualism always leads to a radically secularized culture and a radically pietized church. The culture abandons God, and the church abandons any field it can’t control. From Satan’s standpoint, it’s an ideal arrangement.

Privileging Theology, De-privileging Worldview

Ecclesiastical colonization starts early. In seminaries and Bible colleges, future church leaders are taught the nearly exclusive importance of theology, meaning biblical or systematic theology and including exegesis, hermeneutics, Christology, soteriology, eschatology, and ecclesiology. These topics are necessary, and there can be no robust Faith without them, but the Bible includes much more. The Bible is no less concerned with a Christian view of economics, sex, music, science, and education than with traditionally theological categories. The Bible tells us how we are to live in the world, not just in the church. In fact, the faith disposition of our heart generates a worldview, and this worldview and the philosophy we derive from it shape how we interpret reality — including how we read the Bible.[6]

The culture abandons God, and the church abandons any field it can’t control. From Satan’s standpoint, it’s an ideal arrangement.

Our hearts and minds must be turned toward the Triune God before we can encounter the Bible reverently, and this is why the basic elements of a Christian worldview and philosophy come before even God-honoring Bible reading. Theology, the kind of knowledge central in the church, is not the only knowledge, or even the first knowledge, that needs to be Christian. Our view of reality precedes our view of everything else. It must begin with God and move outward to the world and family and culture and church and all else.

Double-Decker Reality

To better grasp Ecclesiastical colonization, think of the double-decker tour buses in London. Ecclesiastical colonizers move all Christianity into the upper deck of the church and theology. On the lower deck they leave the rest of life as permissibly non-Christian. Christians assume the Bible has nothing relevant to teach about tax rates or foreign policy or education standards or architecture or popular music or movies or cloning or surrogate motherhood or medical care: these are issues that shouldn’t pose big arguments and “everybody should work them out for himself.” The only important matters are evangelism and prayer (mostly in the church) and AWANA programs and Beth Moore Bible studies and church leadership conferences. The upper deck alone is Christian.

Meanwhile, the lower deck gains its independence from Christianity. Why? The bus driver is always on the lower deck. The lower deck, already unattached from the Bible and church and Christianity, jettisons the upper deck, and soon starts driving the entire culture, above which the detached upper deck angelically floats, enjoying its helium holiness, while the lower deck drives the vast majority of cultural riders straight to hell. For this reason Joseph Boot writes: “To limit the kingdom of God to the church is to surrender culture to the enemies of God.”[7]

Conclusion

The temptation to surrender to ecclesiastical colonization is fierce. Living in a radically secular and neo-pagan culture, we feel safe retreating into our churches and ignoring the outside world. But Satan will never respect the sanctity of our churches. His objective in de-sacralizing culture is eventually to de-sacralize the church and family. Our counter-objective must be to re-sacralize all of life. The intention of the kingdom of God is to colonize all of life for Jesus Christ.

[1] P. Andrew Sandlin, Un-Inventing the Church (La Grange, California: Center for Cultural Leadership, 2007).

[2] S. U. Zuidema, Communication and Confrontation (Toronto: Wedge Publishing, 1972), 47.

[3] Christopher Dawson, Medieval Essays (Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1954, 1968), 75–94.

[4] David VanDrunen, “Calvin, Kuyper, and ‘Christian Culture,” in Always Reformed, R. Scott Clark and Joel E. Kim, eds. (Escondido, California: Westminster Seminary California, 2010), 135–153.

[5] Brian G. Mattson, Cultural Amnesia (Billings, Montana: Swinging Bridge Press, 2018).

[6] Andree Troost, What Is Reformational Philosophy? (no loc.: Paideia Press, 2012), 1–21.

[7] No author listed [Joseph Boot], For Mission (Grimsby, Ontario: EICC Publications, 2018) 20.

P. Andrew Sandlin, Center for Cultural Leadership

Posts from the “Uncategorized” Category

Church Bulletin Insert, December 2020

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on March 27, 2020

25 of My Favorite Christian Books You’ve (Probably) Never Read

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on March 18, 2020

My Top Ten Modern Novels

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on March 17, 2020

Parental Responsibility and Covenant Conditionality

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on March 3, 2020

Critical Theory: The Basics

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on February 18, 2020

Thinking about thinking

Dialectical reality

Progress by conflict

Morality is always a power play in flux

The historically inevitable march to human liberation

Human imagination can change everything

Change the world; don’t just analyze it

Gospel: Restoring Humanity, Not Rescuing from Creation

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on February 10, 2020

Man in full

Wealth and sex

The pagans turned away from God, but they couldn’t turn away from their desires for what God intended them to enjoy. They abandoned God’s house and moved into the Devil’s house, but they had to take the furniture with them.

Confidence in our God-rigged universe

Why no anxiety

The Free-Floating Irrelevance of Ecclesiastical Colonization

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on January 31, 2020

Contracting Christianity

Privileging Theology, De-privileging Worldview

Double-Decker Reality

Conclusion